GStreamer SDK aims to simplify cross-platform multimedia development

The open GStreamer library is used in popular media players such as Songbird.

Fluendo and Collabora have teamed up to launch an official GStreamer software development kit (SDK). The aim of the new SDK is to lower the barrier to entry for new GStreamer adopters and make it easier to use the framework across platforms.

GStreamer is an open source multimedia library that is widely used on Linux. GStreamer is implemented in GObject-based C and is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It has a pipeline-based architecture that offers a lot of flexibility, making it suitable for many different usage scenarios, including playback and editing.

Some key applications that incorporate GStreamer include the Songbird music player, the GNOME desktop environment’s Totem and Rhythmbox media players, and Fluendo’s Moovida media player. It has also shipped on a variety of devices, including the Palm Pre and several generations of Nokia’s Linux tablets.

Although GStreamer is closely tied with the Gtk+ toolkit, it’s an acceptable choice for cross-platform development. It gained support for using Quicktime and DirectShow codecs on Mac OS X and Windows back in 2008, partly due to the efforts of Songbird. Since then, its cross-platform support has matured.

Alongside the new SDK, Fluendo and Collabora have also launched a new GStreamer website with additional documentation, including programming tutorials and information about packaging and deploying applications that use GStreamer on various platforms.

In my experience, I’ve found that the Python bindings are a nice way to get started with GStreamer on Linux. It’s pretty easy to build a working multimedia application for GNOME with PyGtk+ and GStreamer.